from the ill-communication dept

We've talked a lot about how while fifth-generation wireless is a good thing (in that faster, more reliable networks are always good), it's been comically over-hyped by cellular carriers and network hardware vendors. It has also been accompanied by what appears to be a race between cellular carriers to broadly misrepresent what 5G is capable of, and where and when it will actually be available. AT&T, for example, began changing the 4G icons on user phones to "5GE," despite the fact actual 5G isn't even out of the oven yet.

Hoping to apparently cash in on AT&T's well-mocked decision while at CES, Verizon subsequently penned this blog post trying to proclaim itself as the more measured of the wired carriers when it comes to 5G:

"The potential for 5G is awesome, but the potential to over-hype and under-deliver on the 5G promise is a temptation that the wireless industry must resist. If network providers, equipment manufacturers, handset makers, app developers and others in the wireless ecosystem engage in behavior designed to purposefully confuse consumers, public officials and the investment community about what 5G really is, we risk alienating the very people we want most to join in developing and harnessing this exciting new technology."

The problem is that Verizon has been at the very forefront of over-hyping 5G for years now. When I went to go dig up numerous past CES appearances where Verizon insisted that 5G would "transform society," I'd noticed they'd disappeared from the CES website. That said, Verizon's own website is filled with examples where the company insists that only 5G can really help us build the smart cities of tomorrow, helping to "spur economic growth," and "improve the quality of life" for city residents. And Verizon's CES appearance by CEO Hans Vesterberg was packed with what most certainly smelled like misleading hype to me:

"It’s going to change everything,” said Vestberg, athletically clad in a tight Verizon-branded T-shirt that wouldn’t be out of place at an Apple or Google product launch.

"It’s quantum leap over 4G,” Vestberg added, in a statement he repeated no less than four times.

Did he also use the term “fourth industrial revolution,” another favorite of 5G marketers? Yup. At least three times.

This idea that a universe of smart city and smart car innovation is only possible via 5G has always been misleading in and of itself. Yes, faster, more resilient networks are good, but there's nothing inherently magical about 5G that will make it somehow forge innovation out of whole cloth. Most existing 4G networks can generally do most of what 5G can (especially with the latest MIMO antenna or other upgrades), 5G networks will just be faster and more resilient with lower latency. 5G is not some mystical panacea. It will, however, probably be used to justify Verizon's higher prices, to be sure.

Verizon has also been accused by competitors like T-Mobile of being misleading on timelines for 5G delivery:

That said not everybody was all that impressed by Verizon's CES demonstration of the "5G revolution":

After a lengthy discussion about how 5G will reduce latency, Verizon's CEO is trying to talk to the company's first 5G internet customer in Houston... on a video call so laggy that they keep talking over each other

Again: 5G will ultimately be a good thing whenever it arrives at any real scale (likely 2020 and later), offering faster speeds, lower latency, and greater reliability. But it's not going to magically fix the wireless sector's nastier problems, like high prices due to regional cell tower backhaul monopolies, the waning competition caused by merger mania, or the slow but steady erosion of internet equality and consumer protections thanks to the industry's lobbying stranglehold over government.

from the meet-the-new-boss dept

We've noted a few times that while fifth-generation wireless (5G) will certainly improve the speed, reliability, and latency of existing networks, it's being pretty painfully overhyped by hardware vendors and cellular carriers. Telecom industry marketing folks spend countless hours insisting that the smart cities and smart cars of tomorrow are only possible with 5G, the sort of claims countless online outlets will repeat utterly unquestioningly. More often than not these claims are based on nothing close to reality (like this one claiming 5G will somehow result in four day work weeks).

While 5G will result in faster, more resilient networks, it doesn't magically somehow unleash additional innovation for tech that already largely works on existing 4G networks (smart cars, smarter cities). And while carriers have begun testing and hyping various incarnations of 5G, broad phone availability on broadly-deployed 5G networks remains years away as companies hammer out battery life issues (Apple isn't releasing a 5G iPhone until 2020, or potentially later) and push 5G upgrades to rural and less affluent cities these companies routinely don't care much about. .

While most media articles on 5G are little more than blind stenography of wireless marketing claims, Sean Hollister at The Verge did a good job last week breaking down 5G's promises, laying down the real-world impact and deployment schedules. More importantly, he narrows in on what's probably the most important question for 5G carriers don't want to answer: how much will 5G cost?

"Consider me a wee bit concerned that on the eve of AT&T’s launch, neither AT&T nor Verizon was willing to talk about how much, how often, how fast, nor answer what’s probably the most burning question: whether we should expect to pay more, less, or the same for 5G connectivity. (Because 5G’s inevitable, right? You’ll be paying for it sooner or later.)

For that matter, neither carrier would even tell me whether today’s data caps might get larger to account for the tremendous amount of data we’ll supposedly be using on 5G. I figured that would be a softball question, but they deflected anyhow.

That question, in turn, is being very directly shaped by the attack on net neutrality:

"I do wonder how the death of net neutrality will embolden the carriers to do things that would have been unthinkable before. One of the reasons carriers argued for the end of net neutrality was to open up “innovative” business models, and it’s possible they’ll look at bundling their own services, or those of partners, with free or discounted 5G connectivity."

Since most of these services aren't launching until next year, it's not surprising they're not able to comment on pricing yet. That said, if the history of telecom is anything to go by, you can be sure of two things related to 5G pricing: it won't be cheap, and (like we're seeing with "unlimited" packages) will be saddled with all manner of caveats designed to nickel-and-dime you just for using it. As such, any evolutionary gains made in network advancement could easily be hamstrung by bad tech policy dictated by mobile carriers.

The problem for carriers: they're not really sure how much nickel-and-diming they can actually get away with, since a lot of that depends on whether the FCC and its ISP BFFs win next February's looming net neutrality lawsuit against the FCC. If the plaintiffs (23 State AGs, Mozilla, and consumer groups) win that case, the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules should be restored, dramatically impacting 5G pricing and plans. Should they win, there's not much (outside of a future FCC or Congress passing new rules) preventing the wireless industry from upping the ante in terms of nickel-and-diming consumers in a wide variety of ways.

That means a lot more of the kind of dubious stuff we're already seeing on 4G networks, such as throttling all video then charging consumers a premium to get around restrictions that shouldn't exist in the first place. So while 5G will be a step forward in many ways, the death of net neutrality will have a lot to say about how much value consumers (both consumer and enterprise) see from 5G. And of course this is before you factor in in the looming Sprint, T-Mobile merger, which will reduce the overall number of competitors, and any real incentive to compete on price.

from the or-don't dept

The saga of antipiracy DRM company Denuvo is a long and tortured one, but the short version of it is that Denuvo was once a DRM thought to be unbeatable but which has since devolved into a DRM that cracking groups often beat on timelines measured in days if not hours. Denuvo pivoted at that point, moving on from boasting at the longevity of its protection to remarking that even this brief protection offered in the release windows of games made it worthwhile. Around the same time, security company Irdeto bought Denuvo and rolled its services into its offering.

And Irdeto apparently wants to keep pushing the line about early release windows, but has managed to do so by simply citing some unnamed AAA sports game that it claims lost millions by being downloaded instead of using Denuvo to protect it for an unspecified amount of time.

In a statement issued by Denuvo owner Irdeto (the latter acquired the former earlier this year), the company states that it tracked pirate downloads of an unnamed ‘AAA’ (big budget, major studio) title during the first few days after its release. Without Denuvo protection it was quickly cracked and made available on P2P networks and from there, pirates did their thing.

“Irdeto tracked the downloads of a major sports title on P2P networks after the title, which did not include anti-tamper protection, was cracked on the same day of its release,” the company says. “During the first two weeks, Irdeto detected 355,664 torrent downloads of the illegal copy of the title. Given the retail price of the game, this puts the total potential loss of revenue from P2P downloads at $21,336,283.”

There are, of course, many issues with this statement. First, citing an unnamed title is a bit odd, since the publisher of that title is quite obviously not a customer of Irdeto's. Or, at the very least, isn't a customer for that particular game. Why the need for anonymity, in that case? It would seem only to Irdeto's benefit to name the title that chose not to be protected by Denuvo. And, if this is all publicly available information, keeping that name secret doesn't make a great deal of sense.

From there, we can move on to Irdeto choosing to keep the math simple by suggesting that every download is a lost sale, in order to come up with its $21 million dollars lost figure. This line of thinking has been debunked so many times that it's not truly worth discussing, other than to say that a DRM company citing it as a valid number should tell you everything you need to know about the wider "report."

And, finally, Irdeto is citing a two week release window important for sales of games as though Denuvo hadn't been defeated on timelines much, much shorter than that. This isn't to say that it's always defeated within two weeks, but that often ends up being the case particularly for AAA titles.

It’s worth noting that while Denuvo games are often cracked very quickly, it’s definitely not uncommon for protection to stand up to the first two weeks of attacks. Denuvo can usually hold off crackers for the first four days, so these figures are obvious marketing tools for a technology that has been somewhat diminished after various cracking groups began taking its challenge personally.

But just in case Denuvo only manages a single day of protection, owner Irdeto suggests that the effort is worth it – even dropping down to the importance of standing firm for an hour.

An hour. An hour. When a DRM company has reached the point of touting that it can protect a game for an entire hour, we've jumped the shark. We don't have much information about the cost of using Denuvo for publishers, since everything I've read suggests publishers have to sign restrictive NDAs that prohibit revealing that information, but I'm struggling to understand how making pirates wait an hour for a cracked game can be worth whatever those costs are.

from the meet-the-new-boss dept

As hardware vendors and cellular carriers prepare deployment of fifth-generation wireless networks, you may have noticed that the hype has gotten a little out of control. Claims that 5G will magically revolutionize the broadband sector sound nice and all, but as we've noted repeatedly, 5G is really more of a modest evolution in existing networks, not some kind of revolutionary panacea that's going to change everything. Still, claims that 5G will somehow usher in amazing smart cities or somehow result in a four day work week for everyone (what?) get far more traction than they probably deserve.

Alongside the generalized hype, carriers are pushing another narrative: that 5G wireless is so incredible, it's going to fix all of the telecom sector's biggest problems by delivering a massive new wave of competition. This competition will be so amazing that net neutrality will apparently be made irrelevant. It's largely bunk originating with telecom industry marketing departments, dutifully swallowed and regurgitated by an unskeptical press.

The problem: 5G, like 4G before it, isn't going to be cheap. Companies like Verizon, AT&T, and CenturyLink still enjoy a monopoly over the backhaul and core transit lines that feed these networks, meaning they're going to do everything in their power to keep prices high along the chain. Protectionist blacklisting of cheap Chinese network hardware and the death of net neutrality isn't likely to help, and Wall Street is making it clear they want 5G priced at a premium to quickly recoup any investment cost:

"How might this look? Well, we could borrow from some other industries. One simple way would be a flat premium price, similar to the "tiers" of Netflix for a higher number of devices or 4K/Ultra HD. So, perhaps $10 per line for 5G, or $25 for a family plan. Another approach would be more akin to broadband, where there are pricing tiers for different levels of service performance. So if the base 4G LTE plan is $50 per month today, for an average 100 Mbps service, 5G packages could be sold in gradations of $10 for higher speeds (i.e. $60 for 300 Mbps, $70 for 500, $80 for 1 Gbps, and so on)."

Despite what you'll hear from carriers, 5G also isn't going to be particularly widely deployed for those living in second or third tier cities or rural markets. You know, the places already hit the hardest by the cable industry's growing monopoly over decent broadband speeds. If you stop for a moment and look beyond the 5G hype curtain, you'll see even Wall Street warning that promises of 5G as a competitive panacea (or a real challenger to cable's domination of speeds of 50 Mbps or above) are dramatically overstated. Analysts at Jefferies, for example, had this to say:

"We continue to believe the threat of 5G to wired broadband is overblown. We are skeptical on the economic viability for a deep rollout given the propagation characteristics of mmWave, and expect sign ups will be slow. Further, given the full footprint rollout of DOCSIS 3.1, and the ability to upgrade the HFC plant to 10 GB symmetrical speeds with little capital investment, we expect 5G's perceived speed advantage will be short lived.”

And while you'll hear a lot of folks at the FCC and elsewhere hyping "fixed" 5G as a real competitive panacea (largely to justify carrier requests for broad, almost mindless deregulation), analysts are skeptical here, too:

"“By the end of 2020, 5G fixed wireless solutions remain niche despite deployments by more than 50 network operators worldwide,” the analysts at CCS Insights wrote in one of their predictions for 2019. “A slew of providers offers fixed wireless access as an alternative to fibre in high-density areas. They follow early launches of 5G networks in the US that take the same approach to providing broadband access in a fixed location. However, such services remain niche, representing only a tiny fraction of total 5G connections in the long term."

To be clear: 5G is going to eventually provide faster, lower latency, and more resilient networks, when it actually arrives at any real scale (think 2021 or later). But it's not going to fix all of the problems that have made U.S. broadband so terribly mediocre, including a lack of serious competition in less affluent markets, the monopoly over the business data services (BDS) market, or those protectionist laws in 21 states monopolies literally purchased in
a bid to hamper competition.

And if ISPs win their looming court case over net neutrality, the nickel-and-diming we're already seeing is going to seem downright quaint in a few years, as Wall Street pushes carriers to find new, "creative" ways to charge even more money for the same service.

from the but-it's-not-a-good-reason dept

President Trump's tweets charging that Google search results are biased, against him and against conservatives, are the loudest and latest version of a growing attack on search engines and social media platforms. It is potent, and it's almost certainly wrong. But it comes at an unfortunate time, just as a more thoughtful and substantive challenge to the impact of Silicon Valley tech companies has finally begun to emerge. If someone were truly concerned about free speech, news, and how platforms subtly reshape public participation, they would be engaging these deeper questions. But these simplistic and ill-informed claims of deliberate political bias are the wrong questions, and they risk undermining and crowding out the right ones. Trump's charges against Google, Twitter, and Facebook reveal a basic misunderstanding of how search and social media work, and they continue to confuse "fake news" with bad news, all in the service of scoring political points. However, even if these companies are not responsible for silencing conservative speech, they may be partly responsible for allowing this charge to gain purchase, by being so secretive for so long about how their algorithms and moderation policies work.

So what do search engines actually do when users access them for information or news? Search engines deliver relevant results, nothing more. That judgment of relevance is based on hundreds of factors: including popularity, topic relevance, and timeliness. Results are fluid and personalized. There's plenty of room in this complex process for overemphasis and oversight, and these are important questions to examine. But serious researchers who actually already study this are careful to take into account the effects of personalization, changes over time, and the powerful feedback effects of users. This is a far cry from looking at your own search results and being troubled by what you see. (Even the author of the report Trump was likely reacting to acknowledges that it was unscientific and disagrees with the suggestion that regulation of search should follow.)

To understand, for instance, the results for "Trump" in Google News, or "Trump news" in Google -- different things, by the way -- we would need to consider some much more likely explanations than deliberate political manipulation: major outlets like CNN may publish a lot more content a lot more often; more users may click on, read, and forward links from these sources; outspoken right-wing sites like Gateway Pundit may have much less trust outside of their devoted base than they imagine; CNN may be much more congruent with centrist political leanings than Trump and conservative critics admit; well-established news sources may already circulate more widely and successfully on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, boosting their rankings on search engines; users may simply be more convinced by these news sources, "voting" for them with their clicks and links in ways that Google picks up on.

In truth, there are important questions to be asked about search engines, social media platforms, and the circulation of news online. There are profound concerns about the economic sustainability of journalism itself when it has to compete on social media platforms. There a profound concerns about the subtle effects of how algorithms work. But the noise that right-wing critics are stirring up is not subtle, it is not helpful, it is not well informed -- and more than that, it is clearly about scoring political points. Those claiming political bias seem wholly uninterested in acknowledging the inquiries already underway.

Charges of left-leaning bias are not new, of course. They come from a very old playbook conservatives have used against newspapers and broadcasters for decades. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley is partly to blame for why it is working so well today. Search engines and social media platforms have been too secretive about how their algorithms work, and too secretive about how content moderation works. In the absence of substantive explanations, users have been left to wonder why search results look the way they do, or why some posts get removed and others don't. This uncertainty breeds suspicion, and that suspicion goes looking for other explanations. This leaves room for trolls, conspiracy mongers, and demagogues to suggest that the platforms are silencing them for their political speech -- conveniently overlooking the fact that they been suspended for making hateful threats, or can't reach the first page of search results because readers trust other sources. And Silicon Valley has bruised their users' trust for so long, that even their genuine explanations sound suspect.

Some of the press coverage, when it's not careful, can inadvertently make the very same easy assumptions that these critics do. Search results, trending lists, and content moderation are not the same thing, they are not managed by the same people, and they are not handled in the same way. Too often, a critic will thread together ill-informed charges against search, one outdated incident regarding trending, and continued uncertainty about moderation practices, and lace them together into a blanket charge of bias. But they are simply different things.

It is unnerving to feel like an apologist for these tech companies. There are real and concerning questions about how search and social media work. I ask some of these questions in my own research, and my field has been thinking about them for years. The ways these companies have addressed, or often failed to address, the public ramifications of search algorithms and moderation policies has been deeply problematic. But these questions of bias distract us from the deeper problems.

It is also disconcerting, just as the public is finally grasping the subtle ways in which search and social media platforms matter, that we are ready to fall back on so simplistic a charge as deliberate political bias. I feel a bit like critics of mainstream news media, who for years have tried to highlight the way contemporary US news organizations are subtly centrist, structurally cautious, founded by commercial imperatives, and under attentive to marginalize voices -- who now have to bracket those critiques and come to the defense of CNN when the President dismisses them as "fake news." Those of us who ask hard questions about search and social media should do so, but we must also steadfastly refused to lump these real concerns in with facile, politically motivated charges of bias that miss the deeper point.

from the 5G-is-whatever-I-say-it-is dept

To be clear: fifth generation (5G) wireless should be really impressive when it actually arrives, providing significantly faster mobile broadband speeds at lower latencies. The catch: the 5G standard hasn't even been created yet, and any real deployment of the ultra-fast technology isn't expected to even seriously begin until 2020. That hasn't stopped wireless carrier and hardware vendor marketing departments, which have been hyping the technology as the second coming for several years now. Sure, these salesmen don't know what 5G really even is yet, but they're pretty sure it's going to fix everything.

As these carriers rush to begin tests on the hardware and software advancements that may someday make up the 5G standard, the real yeoman's work is now being done in marketing. All of the big carriers are tripping over themselves, trying desperately to convince the public that they're going to be the first to offer the amazing new benefits 5G can provide. Verizon has traditionally been at the forefront of this hype, telling anyone who'll listen it hopes to offer gigabit speeds over wireless sometime this year (to a limited number of trial participants).

Not to be outdone, AT&T has upped the ante this week with a proclamation that the company is first to market with "5G Evolution." What is 5G evolution? It's a largely meaningless marketing term concocted by AT&T to describe 4x4 MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) antennas and 256 QAM technologies that can be used to make existing LTE networks faster. It really has nothing whatsoever to do with "5G," but you wouldn't know that from reading AT&T's marketing missives this week:

"AT&T* today announced 5G Evolution plans to pave the way to the next generation of faster speeds for its wireless customers with the latest devices in over 20 major metro areas by the end of this year. We continue to lay the foundation for our evolution to 5G while the 5G standards are being finalized."

"Our 5G Evolution in Austin gives our customers a taste of the future," said David Christopher, chief marketing officer, AT&T Entertainment Group. "With 5G Evolution from AT&T you don’t have to wait to experience endless entertainment possibilities on the next generation network when you have the latest devices."

Except you will wait. For some time. A closer look reveals that the trials are only currently available in a limited part of Austin, and only accessible from those that have one of two mobile devices: the Samsung Galaxy S8 or S8+. And while 4x4 MIMO and 256 QAM advancements are a useful improvement for existing networks, they're not really new, either. T-Mobile has been implementing the upgrades on its own network since last fall.

The features AT&T is calling "5G Evolution" have been live on T-Mobile since 2016. It's not even like this stuff is that new.

And again, this has absolutely nothing to do with "5G." So why are carriers like AT&T and Verizon pushing so hard to hype a technology that doesn't technically exist? For years both carriers justified their higher prices by claiming their networks offered users superior connectivity. But as T-Mobile has ramped up competition, gobbled up their frustrated customers and closed the network coverage and performance gap -- these companies have been forced to find some other way to justify what are fairly consistently some of the highest LTE broadband prices among all developed nations. Their solution for this justification gap? Good, old-fashioned hype.

With "4G" networks, we watched as carrier marketing departments slowly but surely convinced the ITU to let them call pretty much everything short of carrier pigeons 4G. Not to be outdone, you can expect the marketing bastardization of the term "5G" to be dramatically more misleading and annoying.

from the hero-to-zero dept

When the Nest smart thermostat was launched back in 2011, you may recall that it was met with an absolute torrent of gushing media adoration, most of it heralding the real arrival of the smart home. That was in part thanks to the fact the company was founded by Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, both ex-Apple engineers with some expertise in getting the media to fawn robotically over shiny kit. But a parade of high-profile PR failures have plagued the effort since, including several instances where botched firmware updates briefly bricked the device, leaving even the media's resident internet of things evangelists annoyed.

Under the hood it has become increasingly clear that the company was plagued by what some cooperating companies recently proclaimed was an overall "culture of arrogance", manifested in a reputation for blaming Nest's own problems on partner companies. And being acquired by Alphabet (Google) didn't seem to help matters. Despite expanding the company's employee count from 280 to 1200 and being provided a "virtually unlimited" budget, the same press that built Nest into an internet of things god based on a single pretty thermostat design has suddenly and comically realized that Nest hasn't actually done or produced much of anything:

"In return for all this investment, Nest delivered very little. The Nest Learning Thermostat and Nest Protect smoke detector both existed before the Google acquisition, and both received minor upgrades under Google's (and later Alphabet's) wing. A year after buying Dropcam, Nest released the Nest Cam, which was basically a rebranded Dropcam. Two-and-a-half years under Google/Alphabet, a quadrupling of the employee headcount, and half-a-billion dollars in acquisitions yielded minor yearly updates and a rebranded device. That's all."

"Today though, my news is bittersweet: I have decided that the time is right to “leave the Nest.” While there is never a perfect time to transition, we’ve grown Nest to much more than a thermostat company. We’ve created a hardware + software + services ecosystem, which is still in the early growth stage and will continue to evolve to move further into the mainstream over the coming years.

Alphabet CEO Larry Page meanwhile issued a rosy statement of his own about this firing dressed up as a not firing:

"Under Tony’s leadership, Nest has catapulted the connected home into the mainstream, secured leadership positions for each of its products, and grown its revenue in excess of 50% year over year since they began shipping products. He’s a true visionary, and I look forward to continuing to work with him in his new role as advisor to Alphabet. I’m delighted that Marwan will be the new Nest CEO and am confident in his ability to deepen Nest’s partnerships, expand within enterprise channels, and bring Nest products to even more homes."

And while that's sweet and all, Fadell reportedly held an all hands Google meeting back in April after which he was pretty furiously mocked by Google employees, many of which wanted (and presumably still want) Fadell fired and Nest sold off. Google/Alphabet, meanwhile, appears to have gone full speed ahead on a variety of smart home projects that have nothing to do with Nest, including the company's Asus and TP-Link OnHub routers (which have baked in IOT functionality not fully enabled yet), and the more recently unveiled Google Home (Google's version of Amazon Echo).

Nest can certainly still turn things around whether it's sold or remains at Alphabet, and it should soon be clear just how big of a role Fadell's management style played in the company's gear grinding. But the media's manufacture and subsequent demolition of Nest is also part of a broader cautionary tale about the tech media's boundless adoration of style over substance (or, security, as "smart" tea kettles, refrigerators, TVs, and vehicles keep illustrating) when it comes to the internet of shiny things.

from the shameful dept

Well, you knew it was coming. First, law enforcement trotted out random low level "law enforcement officials" to freak out about Apple and Google's announced plans to make encryption the default on mobile phones. Then it got taken up a notch when FBI boss James Comey lashed out at the idea, bizarrely arguing that merely encrypting your data made individuals "above the law" (none of that is accurate). And, now, Comey's boss, Attorney General Eric Holder has stepped up to issue a similar warning. However, Holder has cynically chosen to do so at the Biannual Global Alliance Conference Against Child Sexual Abuse Online.

At this point, it's all too predictable that when anyone in power is getting ready to take away your rights, they'll figure out a way to claim that it's "for the children!" The statements over the past week by law enforcement, Comey and now Holder are clearly a coordinated attack -- the start of the new crypto wars (a repeat of what we went through a decade and a half ago), designed to pass some laws that effectively cripple encryption and put backdoors in place. Holder's take on this is to cynically pull on heartstrings about "protecting the children" despite this having nothing, whatsoever, to do with that.

When a child is in danger, law enforcement needs to be able to take every legally available step to quickly find and protect the child and to stop those that abuse children. It is worrisome to see companies thwarting our ability to do so.

Again, as stated last week, the same argument could be made about walls and doors and locks.

It is fully possible to permit law enforcement to do its job while still adequately protecting personal privacy.

The key issue here is "adequately" and forgive many of us for saying so, but the public no longer trusts the DOJ/NSA/FBI to handle these things appropriately. And, just as importantly, we have little faith that the backdoors that the DOJ is pushing for here aren't open to abuse by others with malicious intent. Protecting personal privacy is about protecting personal privacy -- and the way you do that is with encryption. Not backdoors.

But Holder used this opportunity to cynically pile on about criminals using encryption, rather than noting any of the important benefits towards privacy they provide:

Recent technological advances have the potential to greatly embolden online criminals, providing new methods for abusers to avoid detection. In some cases, perpetrators are using cloud storage to cheaply and easily store tens of thousands of images and videos outside of any home or business – and to access those files from anywhere in the world. Many take advantage of encryption and anonymizing technology to conceal contraband materials and disguise their locations.

The DOJ has long wanted to restart the crypto wars that it lost (very badly) last time around (even though that "loss" helped enable parts of the internet to thrive by making it more secure). For years it's been looking to do things like reopen wiretapping statutes like CALEA and mandate wiretap backdoors into all sorts of technology. Now it's cynically jumping on this bit of news about Apple and Google making it just slightly easier to protect your privacy to try to re-open those battles and shove through new laws that will emphatically decrease your privacy.

from the media-hype dept

Since we originally predicted and then witnessed major media outlets losing their minds over the horrific attempted murder committed by two young girls in Wisconsin, you may have heard that there has been a second attempted killing by another young girl that's also being billed as a "Slender Man killing." In this latest case, a young girl wore a white mask and attempted to stab her mother. She too is supposedly involved in the Creepypasta community and was interested in the Slender Man story. Media outlets, that really ought to know better, have since been knocking each other over in an attempt to shine the largest spotlight on an internet community that enjoys telling each other ghost stories in an attempt to assign blame for the horrors on which they report. It turns out that, should they delve a little deeper to understand what the Slender Man community is all about, perhaps they should be turning that spotlight on themselves instead.

Fruzsina Eordogh, who appears to be well informed about how the Creepypasta community and the Slender Man myth operates, outlines the folly that is mass media reporting on the two attacks. He claims there have been two glaring omissions in the reporting, the first of which is an absolute refusal to include the attention multipliers of online myth disseminators like Pew Die Pie. Pew Die Pie is something of a YouTube celebrity and his work includes Slender Man videos.

The little girls first tried to stab their friend in a public restroom, then in the woods. Both scenes, of Slender Man catching up with you in a public restroom and in the woods, happen in the first episode of Pew Die Pie's Slender Man video series. Is Pew Die Pie responsible for the stabbings? No, of course not.

In the case of the 13-year-old girl, her mother mentioned her daughter plays Minecraft, and the ultimate bad guy in the game is Enderman, a creepy figure the creator of Minecraft admitted to being inspired by Slender Man. Is Minecraft responsible for the stabbings? Again, no, of course not, but yet again every outlet has failed to mention the Slender Man-inspired monster in Minecraft.

Understanding the point of the above is key: nobody is blaming Pew Die Pie, Minecraft, or anyone else using the myth to tell stories for the killings. The sole point being made is that you have to understand the way the Slender Man community works: it is built off of gaining recognition in wider audiences. That's the whole point of the community, to expand upon the myth by creating doctored pictures, telling wilder stories, and getting Slender Man out there as widely as possible. The whole myth started with fictional photographs and news reports. That's the point. And guess how you take that to the next level?

Think of Slender Man as a community art project, where for years now adults, teens and tweens have been fabricating fake news articles, photographs, and even video games and comics, about Slender Man, this all-powerful, all-knowing spectre-monster with long arms (shaped like claws, or tree branches, or tentacles depending on the artist) that mind controls and kills people. When these two Wisconsin girls say they wanted to honor the Slender Man myth, to make him "real" and prove the "skeptics wrong," it sounds more like they wanted to participate in the community by creating the most credible news article about Slender Man ever. They didn't want to make him real by doing another photoshop, that's already been done. So how do you make the most credible news article about Slender Man? You actually go out and make Slender Man happen in a way the news can cover.

And, because these kids have a basic understanding of the world in which they live, they likely damn well knew the mass media would gobble this up like pigs at a trough. The girls in Wisconsin did more to propel the Slender Man myth into the public consciousness than anyone had before and the news outlets were their tools and unwitting conspirators. By the time the ink was dry on the Wisconsin story, a young girl in Ohio would have all the confirmation required on how to keep the news multiplier going in favor of Slender Man. Slender Man has jumped out of the fictional realm now, like the Poltergeist leaping from a television, and the news is the highway it took to get there.

Any media outlet that reports on this story and fails to mention that they as an outlet are now contributing to the Slender Man myth, is laughably ignorant and dangerous. The press does not exist in a vacuum. The press cannot blame CreepyPasta and memes but not blame itself or Pew Die Pie. In fact, the primary driver of the Slender Man myth is no longer Pew Die Pie, Minecraft, CreepyPasta, reddit, 4chan or Something Awful, but the press itself.

At some point all the people of our world are going to have to sit down and have a long conversation about how our news media operates to glorify some of the horrors we face. Murderers, school shooters, and terrorists all rely on the clockwork-like commitment of mass media to turn them into what they most want to be: a spectacle. We don't have to play along, but we do. That part's on us. But it's also on a media culture that prefers to keep the important role that they play out of the story.

from the what-a-waste-of-time dept

So, this weekend's news in the tech world was flooded with a "story" about how a "chatbot" passed the Turing Test for "the first time," with lots of publications buying every point in the story and talking about what a big deal it was. Except, almost everything about the story is bogus and a bunch of gullible reporters ran with it, because that's what they do. First, here's the press release from the University of Reading, which should have set off all sorts of alarm bells for any reporter. Here are some quotes, almost all of which are misleading or bogus:

The 65 year-old iconic Turing Test was passed for the very first time by supercomputer Eugene Goostman during Turing Test 2014 held at the renowned Royal Society in London on Saturday.

'Eugene', a computer programme that simulates a 13 year old boy, was developed in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The development team includes Eugene's creator Vladimir Veselov, who was born in Russia and now lives in the United States, and Ukrainian born Eugene Demchenko who now lives in Russia.

[....] If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a series of five minute keyboard conversations it passes the test. No computer has ever achieved this, until now. Eugene managed to convince 33% of the human judges that it was human.

Okay, almost everything about the story is bogus. Let's dig in:

It's not a "supercomputer," it's a chatbot. It's a script made to mimic human conversation. There is no intelligence, artificial or not involved. It's just a chatbot.

Plenty of other chatbots have similarly claimed to have "passed" the Turing test in the past (often with higher ratings). Here's a story from three years ago about another bot, Cleverbot, "passing" the Turing Test by convincing 59% of judges it was human (much higher than the 33% Eugene Goostman) claims.

It "beat" the Turing test here by "gaming" the rules -- by telling people the computer was a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine in order to mentally explain away odd responses.

The "rules" of the Turing test always seem to change. Hell, Turing's original test was quite different anyway.

As Chris Dixon points out, you don't get to run a single test with judges that you picked and declare you accomplished something. That's just not how it's done. If someone claimed to have created nuclear fusion or cured cancer, you'd wait for some peer review and repeat tests under other circumstances before buying it, right?

The whole concept of the Turing Test itself is kind of a joke. While it's fun to think about, creating a chatbot that can fool humans is not really the same thing as creating artificial intelligence. Many in the AI world look on the Turing Test as a needless distraction.

Oh, and the biggest red flag of all. The event was organized by Kevin Warwick at Reading University. If you've spent any time at all in the tech world, you should automatically have red flags raised around that name. Warwick is somewhat infamous for his ridiculous claims to the press, which gullible reporters repeat without question. He's been doing it for decades. All the way back in 2000, we were writing about all the ridiculous press he got for claiming to be the world's first "cyborg" for implanting a chip in his arm. There was even a -- since taken down -- Kevin Warwick Watch website that mocked and categorized all of his media appearances in which gullible reporters simply repeated all of his nutty claims. Warwick had gone quiet for a while, but back in 2010, we wrote about how his lab was getting bogus press for claiming to have "the first human infected with a computer virus." The Register has rightly referred to Warwick as both "Captain Cyborg" and a "media strumpet" and has long been chronicling his escapades in exaggerating bogus stories about the intersection of humans and computers for many, many years.

Basically, any reporter should view extraordinary claims associated with Warwick with extreme caution. But that's not what happened at all. Instead, as is all too typical with Warwick claims, the press went nutty over it, including publications that should know better. Here are just a few sample headlines. The absolute worst are the ones who claim this is a "supercomputer."

Anyway, a lot of hubbub over nothing special that everyone seemed to buy into because of the easy headlines (which is exactly what Warwick always counts on). So, since we just spent all this time on a useless nothing, let's end it with the obligatory xkcd: